Lacanista Blog

It is now certain

2009-05-15T22:59:00.000-06:00

I am not to be trusted with my own life.

grape leaves

2008-10-05T23:32:00.006-06:00

Amidst all your bounty -- and it was bounteous, the way you always had homemade goods to distribute, bottles of wine to share, a smile and a limmerick for drunken friends and strangers alike, sharing of your sweet bread and mellow wine -- you were the stingiest man I've ever loved.

You masked your withdrawal in droves of generosity, you drowned your guests in welcome, and you made me feel the most welcome of all. At the same time, you obfuscated with your eyes, circumnavigated with your words, and did everything in your power to appear open and willing while doing nothing in your life to be so. It was the perfect ruse, and you wore it as well as you wore those sexy cutoffs you gardened in (a spectacle appreciated by neighbors and friends of mine alike, who always seemed to stop by when you were outside glistening with a light coat of sweat and orange dirt accentuating your tan).

I don't know if you loved me at all; it took years for us to finally speak about it. After too many longing grope sessions, too many half-spoken and anguished non-coversations, too many drunken if onlys; after I'd broken up with my boyfriend, and then that one ambivalent something other in your bedroom. I had always felt, in the end, that you used me, and not for anything whose value I could easily assess by the going rates. I had always felt that your obfuscation was more than just our miscommunication, more than just my neurosis, more than just a vague sense of being pawed at existentially in an inelegant manner. Let's face it, it's a poetic story that you sat in the downstairs apartment playing that song relentlessly, pining for me, while I tred upstairs with a man I no longer loved, hearing that same song, thinking only of you.

So, after it all seemed to no longer matter, it (or we?) came back; an evening of celebration ending in the first real night of connections that weren't crossed awkwardly between us. I'll admit you caught me in the middle of a time of rampant and wanton wanting-nothing-more than to enjoy what I had going, defiant after a heartache brought on by another. But I was open to all the we's I had imagined we might make in years before, and ready to find you if you were honestly looking to be found. And then you gave me a thank you card, more or less, although not Hallmark. What it said exactly I no longer remember, but it hit me like a sting of distance, a misplaced sense of propriety, as if addressed to any number of numbers; and what's worse, it was a reminder of a previous Christmas card during our tumultous unspoken love days, when you had just fucked my best friend and not thought it important to tell me and yet wrote me in dulcet tones, saying everything just right. It struck me the wrong way, that morning after card and its tone of gratitude. I was a hurt and thus ungenerous reader, granted, but it felt as fake as the openness I had always found suspicious, tasted as dry as the crumbs of bread I'd found on the porch days after our long nights in the olden days. It felt like the door to your inner sanctum was slammed shut while the text proclaimed loudly "please come in" in a formal but hospitable voice. If there was another reading, I failed to find it. This was not the first or last of my failures with you.

Instead of addressing the situation, I opted for an attempted replay of the past, only succeeding at the drunken part of the past; we ended up with a sad fight whose contents I didn't remember upon waking, but whose sensation I have never lost. Pain, accusation, anger: pot, kettle, black. I do remember vividly that you accused me of precisely what I believed to be true of you: "you don't want what you say you want." The cardinal sin among the passionate yet rational, to those like us with equal allegiance to the mind and the heart. It was painful and/or silly and maybe it meant nothing, but it ended with a kind of fixity that erased the need for further interpretation. There we were, at a stalemate. And all my suspicions felt confirmed; I added fuel to fire my narrative of you as master hoarder of love, taking it from so many women, giving it back to none; you, offering of your bounty and yourself, but pulling the latter back at the last minute, just when a hopeful mouth had almost closed warmly around a string of your heart. You, jealous of any context that wasn't immediately favorable to your re-ignited-by-long-absence desire.

Any woman who loves you, I thought then, must find herself in the unique and unsettling position of feeling like the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. Finally taken and seemingly enjoyed, only to be immediately cast aside because some greater stake has caused her to taste bitter to your sensual mouth. And there's no discussing of details when the immortals fall: there is only mortal silence. In the end (and in the beginning), I failed because I viewed you as a deity and not a man; as some antique god come back to create love anew, a dazzling mix of Apollo and Rimbaud. The weaknesses of a mortal man were not enough to trip you up in my eyes; only a flaw of mythic proportions and based on hubris would have been enough. And I found or invented one, as this narrative attests.

Yet, even now, many years after our uneasy parting, I remember sitting alone above you and longing for you before I even knew exactly what I was longing for in you--sending out poems to a kindred. I remember a stolen kiss on the sunroom floor that was so electric I felt as if Zeus had punished us with a thunderbolt, delivering extreme delight before decimating us. I remember the grape leaves you harvested from the back steps, turning them into exquisite dolmas and offering them up for awed communion. I remember all of this, and I'm ashamed. Ashamed that I never shared with you the simplest doubts, asked the simplest questions. Ashamed that I never let you reassure me, never gave you a chance to be reassured by me. Ashamed for judging you simultaneously as godlike in your generosity and small in your stinginess, when all you were was beautifully flawed. Ashamed for never finding out what your real flaws were.

dating professors

2008-04-13T19:08:00.004-06:00

Me:

It's not fair that so much in a small supposedly
neutral midwestern town reminds me of you ...I miss you.

Him:

a) Nothing's fair.
b) I'm very, very happy that you do.
c) Me too.
d) You give good pocket.

Some other moment....

Me:

"You love Charlotte: either you have some hope and then you will act; or
else you have none, in which case you will renounce. That is the discourse
of the 'healthy' subject: either/or. But the amorous subject replies (as
Werther does): I am trying to slip between the two members of the
alternative: i.e., I have no hope, but all the same. . .Or else: I
stubbornly chose not to choose; I choose drifting: I continue."

--need I say who?

Him:

P.S. I hereby promise myself never again to fall for a woman who is writing
her dissertation about love!

**********************************************************************

To Another, now long ago:

you're a used up cliche dr. professor
but i'll open my mind and my legs for your themely research
even go so far as to cite the litany of your bookshelf
in proper sequential order

and if you don't find the kernel of your genius
tucked between the sheaves of my being and if
my gaze beyond your table of contents
reflects no trace of your mastery

don't worry--
you'll pass the exam of mortality like the rest of us

naive diatribe

2008-04-13T18:34:00.003-06:00

A snippet of a naive but heartfelt diatribe from today:

"I guess my response to the student who thinks poetry is a waste of time could be some diatribe about the value of human expression and how human cognition is closely related to our modes of expression, so we learn so much about what it means to be human when engaging with fiction and other types of cultural products, even if we don't find personal interest or beauty, etc., etc. Or, that the thorny problems of being human are often best (most interestingly? poignantly?) addressed not in a documentary (although those are valuable), but in a piece of writing that seems to do something other than tell a story.

Or maybe I'd stick Paul Celan's poem "Todesfugue" under her eyes and, after having her read it aloud, I'd say: "If a person who has been through something like the Holocaust can make art out of horror, out of pain and incomprehension; if someone can look at all the damage and destruction humans can wreak on each other, and produce art...not for art's sake, but for something else...(for expression's sake?), then reading poetry matters. If we can learn one goddamn thing about humanity from engaging with the act of putting words on a page in a way that is not about reporting, simply describing, or simply telling, but rather in a way that uses human language almost against itself (if we believe naively that language is about communication), then we've got something to learn from reading poetry. If science and history have not been able to answer (fully or successfully) the important questions about why humans do what they do, what humans mean when they love, when they face death, when they lie and cheat, when they hurt one another, when they fucking destroy each other, then we still have something to learn from poetry."

We are the creatures who make meaning, who hurt (and who know that writing "who hurt" -- in English, at least -- has both an active and passive meaning).

invito lectore

2008-03-15T22:20:00.004-06:00

I'm not sure why I've stopped writing my blog. At first sign of the slow-down, I raided my own past and stole posts from less bloggy (and more social) spaces, migrating them slowly over to this, "the blog" that was to be my means of expression. The space that was to serve as the anonymous locus of my meandering mind, the poetic wrecks of my love life unfurling, the beginning of my fictionalized autobiography, even. I've let it go silent.

It's all become like some cold, dried out (but still clammy) slop of spaghetti sitting on the dinner plate hours after dinner is over. And there's no mommy hovering nearby, pointedly ignoring me while she does the dishes (or at least does something useful, you can hear by the bustling sound she makes) while I sit there and stare down the inevitable mass. Staring it down, maybe, but not really seeing it, for I'm lost in my own thoughts and only vaguely aware of the hard wood of the chair poking awkward pressure onto my then-scrawny butt bones.

There is a general protest that I haven't listened to, rising in my blood. There is a childish refusal that I know to be relentlessly misguided. As I sit here now, before my computer, typing nothing on this other project I should be creating, I hear a vehement "je m'accuse" made of silence. It's as if someone put duct tape across the mouth of my little typing soul, and I sit and observe the scene hours later. She's so blase about it that she looks more like a jaded emo erstwhile dominatrix taking a break from plying the trade than a wronged victim of some nefarious plot. There is no plot. Not even of my own making. This is what I refuse to face.

When will I become writing again? Even Dora had a plot. She wrote her ending beautifully; so what if Freud had the last written word.

surrender

2007-09-18T09:20:00.000-06:00

a short list of things I'm not afraid of:

--Comets.
--Choking on grapes.
--Cat scratch fever.
--Snakes.
--Foreign films.
--Pollen.
--Love.
--Buddha.
--Bad TV.
--Leap years.
--Karaoke.
--Surrender.
--Sunburn.
--Woods.
--Sex.
--Tornadoes.
--Wardrobe malfunctions.
--Complexity.
--Creativity.

Ok, maybe I'm wrong about Surrender--but I'm working on it.

beguilement

2007-09-04T21:29:00.000-06:00

I've tried all of my life, in myriads ways -- unconsciously and consciously, painfully and precociously -- to be beguiling. To beguile. To create beguilement.

I have no idea if I've ever succeeded. But wait, is that disingenious? I mean nothing deceitful here; nothing deceptive in my guile -- as if the word is stripped of its stronger origin and only carries the charm instead. Like a love elixir you drink freely but whose precise effects you can never determine. Is it working? Maybe? Well...yes! But then, possibly, maybe not....

Reading some essays by Adam Phillips an hour or so after typing in the above, I come across this: "'You know what charm is?' the narrator of Camus's The Fall asks. 'A way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.'

promises, gifts (re-posted)

2007-08-26T11:12:00.000-06:00

This is from elseblog as well -- it's at least 2 years old -- but I want it here now.

promises, promises

I promised someone I would write. But after a night of dreaming (preceded by so many dreamless nights) I can only wonder at the narrative thread. Why is it so easy to read? I would have wanted less temporality, less careful unfolding, less story; I would have preferred to approach it like a child ripping off the holiday wrapping paper -- only there to create invisibility and to titillate -- and surely nothing exists with certainty until it is seen framed in a box with air and tissue paper as coating. But, of course, it isn't an easy dream to read, only to follow, like Theseus follows Ariadne. I didn't want a story, though. I have enough of those.

Sometimes we stay alive for others. (yes, I know that's a main theme of _The Hours_, but bear with me). Nameless others. Others who don't fit into our narrative threads. It's a gift. And yet, we blame our living on those to whom we call out when we feel the burden of it. It is hard, nearly impossible, perhaps entirely futile, to give someone a gift he doesn't want. That is a story that doesn't unfold neatly the way a prim lady opens a gift without surprise, even in not-knowing she finds a way to create distance (because surprise is vulgar). That is a story that can only be written on the inside of the paper. I have too much writing on my side. I'm tired of narratives that loop, I'm tired of what S. calls my "trapdoor memory."

What evolutionary sense does it make that some of us are "exposed here on the cliffs of the heart", as Rilke writes? What evolutionary sense does it make to leave traits that can only make pretty things out of the general suffering? When young women are being murdered by their families in Iraq for having been kidnapped and been under the threat of rape (and elsewhere, here, for other reasons); what does it matter that pain swells up in me like an inky wave that will pull in its wake all but the dirty residue? When we are daily killing innocent people (and guilty ones, too) for no justifiable reason in what we call a war, why does it matter that I sit like an overly sensitive tastebud awash in the same liquids, the same damn food, the same bitter and sour and sweet and acid, over and over? Why does this world not slough? Bodies are not self-cleansing. My mind cannot be erased. What happens when Cassandra never dies, and yet tragedy is no longer functional?

I wait on you patiently as if you were elsewhere, and yet I wait on you daily, impatiently serving myself up as your witness. When will you write your story? When did you get transfixed here? Why is my narrative so limited, so narcissistic? Why can't I write beyond myself? I know you are already there, though; all tangled up like the knots at the deep neck-side of my hair after a night of dreaming that comes too easy. I pull them out blindly with my fingers, stubborn yet fragile reminders of narratives I don't want to write again; mindful, mindful of the dull pain of repetition. But I think it's you who pulls the lever on the trapdoor; I think it's you who gently shakes the unwanted gift, curious nonetheless to know its contents. You are one of those cunning children who unwraps just the corners of the package under the tree--just enough to see what it is--and then gingerly wraps it back, leaving no traces. You are innocent, innocent, without residue, without trace. I think it's you, with your sly innocence, who seeks comfort in my exposure. I think it's you who calls forth this gift.

dear you

2007-08-26T11:08:00.000-06:00

Don't believe you've won the game of who can push the other further away just because your arms are longer. Only a fool would play without understanding how magnets function. Don't believe, furthermore, that it's a game one can win. I'm already resigned to losing, but that doesn't mean you won't lose, too. Perhaps even moreso.

Don't believe in cardinal directions, your own certainty, that there's such a thing as too much mirth, or that anchors always hit bottom.

A personal note to your heart: do believe in rationality, just don't believe it will save you from anything, least of all yourself.

good cleaning, bad poetry

2007-08-26T10:12:00.000-06:00

I keep finding things as I clean out the cobwebs of the new mac (Clio), leftovers from the transfer of the dead mac's data (Glinda the Good Witch). By things I mean writings. Little poetic nibblets I try to place into some context. Given my melancholic nature, I could have written them at any time, but combined with my need to close doors in verse, I would assume they all bear some sort of date-stamp of my comings and goings. The "you"'s are likely direct addresses, even if, like all such attempts at addressing, there are many addressees, many receivers, and the wonderful chance of destinerrance.

They are all bad, in any case, these little things: that's certain.

What about this one, which I found in a series having seemingly the theme of being up all night, for example?

what do you care if I say what I have to say
speech is my weakness
search now or search later
you’ll find me in your shoe
you don’t even know how to look

so many nights end like this without end
I hate to be your cliché

you look away because
you know how to
but what you don’t know
you think I have

There is a name I think belongs to this. There is, of course, the obvious Vallejo reference (the shoe, the seeking in the everyday object). There is the Lacan (the subject-supposed-to-know, being or having the phallus). And now I think this "you" is me, that I've addressed myself from the position of another; accused myself of being incapable of looking, except for looking away.

In the same series (and by series, I simply mean within the same word document, separated by a string of &&&&&&& signs), I find this little snippet.

there are nights voluminous
with my longing

there are days that knock at the back door
with my functioning

it is never too much when you want it

Again, a hint of Vallejo. Coupled this time with Sappho? Or is that accidental? It reminds me of the recent reader's report I got to an article on Stendhal that suggested that the article had been translated from the French. An odd insult which I took rather as a compliment. What tell-tale traces marked it as enmeshed in a French that was only channelled (not translated)? That is a bit like the feeling of the Sappho I get here -- a fragment, missing something, translated from an archaic idiom -- it makes everything perhaps both more blunt and more mysterious than it need have been. But seriously -- voluminous nights? A new low. On the other hand, certainly I recognize here the feeling of being cursed with functioning; the lack of collapse or total breakdown; the desire that keeps growing because of this.

And, finally, the piece de resistance in this found triptych of bad writing:

We feed each other ugliness with dime-store spoons
the soft gurgle of your throat’s drunkenness interrupts a peal of laughter

We cling to each other’s extremities with bloated attachment
a confused cupid sits gaping and cross-eyed in the fireplace

It’s a processional of miserly misnomers--
a litany of lingering impossibilities

We don’t even know how to desire what desires us
the long jagged straws begging for a match

As my questions litter the ashtray
your need crushes the cigarette’s last ember

Beauty, beauty --
and our ugliness grows fattened like veal

I have no idea what to say here. This is really bad, but it evokes the most feeling from me. I can feel the sad and pointed disgust, the exhausted accusation of the 'we'. I think this one is perhaps most directly about B, the artist, whose desire for beauty was so strong, but even stronger must have been some secret sensation that beauty could only exist if he hollowed a place out of himself and filled it with pain and shit. But I'm not sure this had anything to do with that relationship. It may well have been written before it, for all I remember.

My hard drive is full of these things. Some of them I remember well -- a big spurt of writing from Paris left pages and pages of poems in its wake -- others I recognize only by guessing at which poet I'm aping, which lover I'm mourning, which "you" of the me I'm accusing. Even bad poetry has its place.

when is enough enough?

2007-08-26T00:28:00.001-06:00

No, really: when?

Is it when you get hit on in a bar by someone 10 years your younger who asks, ever so sweetly, "Now that you know I'm 25, do you think I'm too young to date you?" and your first, internal and guilty-feeling response to yourself is, "Given the summer I've had, you may be too old!".

The question isn't age. That's an easy question, or rather, the answer is easy on a case-by-case basis. The question is why. Or what. What are you seeking? Wouldn't it be easy, indeed, too easy, to say that you are trying to recapture your own youth? And don't we all know from a thousand movies and a thousand cliches that this always fails? But no, that's not it. But then, what? And again, why?

And you speculate and speculate about your own hidden motives. And you think about chance and probability. Will math save you or damn you? But none of this offers any convincing explanation. And, of course, you get all psychoanalytic on yourself, and you worry that maybe you're putting off the enacting of a very important life decision by spending time with people who aren't anywhere near making that decision; who can't even impact your decision; or worse, it's because their very youth precludes your own ability to decide that you answer their question to you. But then, you know that you know better than this; in fact, if you already know this, then that's probably not it at all. So, then what?

And maybe the question isn't why or what. It's certainly not who. Maybe it's when. When is enough enough? But then, cagey and sly, you get to ask "enough for what?", and the cycle begins again. Why? What? Which one do you prefer?; which one prefers you? Suddenly you feel enamored of the question mark. You realize that it--this mark--is your seduction; it is the game you've been playing, over and over. And maybe that's the question they never ask about you: when? Maybe there's no further question to follow that "when?" for them; not any more than can be answered by a precise day or a time of night. This leaves you with too much question unanswered.

So the when is yours. Yours alone. The question mark, your remiss lover, taunts you to turn and face it. It's rather like cosmic payback for the hubris of daring to trace it down your back in glitter as the new millenium broke into its temporal incarnation. "I am a beautiful question to myself," you said then, echoing the words another had given you, as if the question mark were a name you earned in some ancient rite of passage that could only be passed on by another.

And maybe it's time you asked yourself a different question.

the bearing down

2007-05-10T19:07:00.000-06:00

This is an old one, taken from elseblog, delivered here, almost exactly one year later.

the unbearable bearing down

And you want to believe in the why and the wherefore, if for no other reason than wherefore is a comforting word, like an antique chair that has endured countless moves and messy children and pets and drunk mothers and formidable dust accumulation, among other ills that may befall a chair; but it is comforting in its thereness.

Wherefore, the word of Juliet from a balcony, self-spoken, and in 8th-grade thinking another girl your own age in some other age had the courage and the lust and the wonder and the wherewithal to stand on a balcony and utter those silly words of seeking into the night; and better, that a 30-something year-old man penned those words for her lips and you could sit in an antique chair and read them, like some other girl or man did a couple hundred years ago, a different weight distribution but still, the bearing down is what matters while the words float up past you. Wherewithal--wherefore--the where more important than the why alone. Meaning why nonetheless, for what reasons, and even perhaps how, as in how did this come to be, another way of why-ing. There is much to be curious about in the where and its decrepit little fore, rendered useless in our times, obsolete.

But you want to believe in it, or at least that someone somewhere believes in it, and answers for it, if only silently. Silence is comforting, too. It's not necessary that you believe in it, but that someone somewhere does -- they believe in it for you while you attend to other matters. You want to feel a certain solidity in your language, in your frame of reference, in the things you sit on. Someone should see to it, shouldn't they? Why and wherefore and heavy wooden objects and the floor should be in place before the dancing, yes?

rings

2007-05-02T21:27:00.001-06:00

It's that time of the year when the time of day is measured by determining which is freshest on the stack of papers around me: coffee rings or wine rings? Coffee rings slowly brown, losing any sweet trace of sugar and cream, instead becoming more like a blood stain on a white t-shirt you find in the laundry hamper two weeks after the bloodletting. Wine rings, dusty scarlet in color, circle like snails around a folder, intermixing occasionally with the coffee rings as if together they want to make one big set of Olympic-style rings. They pretend to mark a triumph that is never certain.

Sometimes the coffee ring comes back over the wine ring, weaker and lighter, just barely traced onto the edge of a paper (a sleepy hand surely set the cup so poorly there, and pushed it farther away with a nudge); and then the little splashes of wine dribbled in a careless gesture of combustible thought, but now laying there so like erstwhile punctuation marks.

And all of this, this process, this thinking, intermingled with all this feeling (for lately, I have been feeling, and thinking-feeling, the curse, so acute) reminded me of this one Rumi poem. What are all my subtle arguments good for, anyway, I wonder, except to make some sloppy yet intricate patchwork rings around a bunch of papers and folders, things that come and go, thoughts that come and go and disintegrate? But so much falling have I done, do you know what I mean? I was made to fall. So many exquisite sky circles, the invisible sad sister of the snow angel, whose pedestrian brothers, the coffee ring and wine ring, keep me company.....

Anyway, here's the poem:

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they're given wings.

- Rumi

mixing it up

2007-04-13T19:53:00.000-06:00

If you've ever heard a good dj spin, you know that the segues they pull from song to song are not as easy as the uninitiated might assume. The way one song flows into another, or the way beats intertwine to keep you shaking your tail with the same exact groove ... these may seem effortless, but they are planned, thoughtful. I imagine the dj who pulls off an immaculate transition feels quite a lot of satisfaction, but it's not the same as the dancer, lost in the rhythm, who only feels a deepening or slackening, some kind of minor adjustment in what was already so very good. The satisfaction isn't the same; the awareness is different.

I know very little of such things, I'm just borrowing the theme. Because, you see, I know what it's like when it doesn't flow. If you've listened to one of those party-mix filters on your itunes, for example, you know the awful transitions, the accidental overlapped pairs that mix like oil and water; that do a little something nasty to the song on either end. The beats thump wrong. It feels tainted--like drinking rusty water.

I'm in the middle of some kind of transition, and, a bit like the unknown trip ahead the moment you drop the tab of acid on your tongue, I don't know which path I'm on. I don't know what kind of transition I'm heading into...and I fear it's the smooshed up, dropped music-box version, the existential unfortunate segue from song to song. I don't know why there's recent Madonna on the soundtrack, or why men who seem so very very different, but may in fact be the same repeating character, appear and re-appear. I don't know which beat is leading, nor in which direction. I don't know if my heart's thump is regular, reliable, keeping the beat and telling me something important; or erratic, in error, thudding itself into some contorted palpitation that only feels right because I'm not aware enough to know the difference.

burnt pudding, you know what I mean

2007-03-13T19:49:00.001-06:00

There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken. Like bones. Who feels their femur as anything more than part of a leg generally, and part of a pedestal for the body more generally, including the feet, hips, etc? It's when something snaps or cracks or pops; when an x-ray could reveal a fracture (hairline, they say sometimes, which I find utterly charming) that you become acutely aware of the bone itself. That it is longer and thicker than you thought or thinner than you thought, or just placed differently than you had expected when you came crashing down on it. "Funny, I don't remember that there...not exactly like that..."

I've never had a broken bone (knock on wood, or bone, or china, whatever works), so I'm not entirely sure of the analogy. Of course, you knew it was an analogy. Or a metaphor. Or a metonymy. (I'm not on the clock, you figure it out.) In any case, I've never felt just like this -- the physical sensation of nausea so near to me at all times. All I need do is recall, think, remember, feel in a certain way (or in several certain ways) and suddenly I'm mock heaving. The heave is real, of course, but no organic cause determines it. There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken, and they're not all bones apparently.

I should be smelling burnt pudding, be aphasic or Germanophobic (wait, I already am the latter), or at least beset by a grand mal, as the quaint expression went. How am I stuck here with my paltry nausea? My silly little stomach-churning anguish, my faint-feeling languish? I should find myself in an anatomical book illustration, a stick figure peeling her skin back coyly so the gaze can penetrate beneath. Am I not transparent? Do you people not see the cause and the effect? Do you not smell the burnt pudding? How can I write under these conditions?

a question I cannot answer

2007-03-11T09:30:00.000-06:00

May I quote you, dearest Leo? "Did something precipitate his sudden lack of imagination?"

It is very telling of your character, comrade, that the word imagination is the anchor of your question. I like it. A sudden lack of imagination can stop one dead in one's tracks, or send one straight into therapy, or force one to withdraw affect entirely. What is powerful enough to stop one's ability to imagine? When things seem too perfect, maybe there's only one thing left to imagine or maybe that's how one is made to feel (by me, for example)?

One can mull over a sense of foreboding, a state of tension, but the feeling of danger? I don't know. Maybe that's the kind of thing one can't imagine one's self into or out of. It gums up the works. Full stop. Don't look back. Looking back would entail imagining, beginning to imagine again. And that would entail recognizing that something could have happened differently, that it almost did, that it still could. The 'could' leaves room for the as-yet unimagined. And that seems ... well... dangerous? Difficult? Overwhelming?

Leo, what made you imagine differently?

mornings, hating them

2007-03-06T17:39:00.000-06:00

I"ve always been a little lazy about mornings. I think the only times I bound out of bed with energy is when I have something to do immediately--something exciting (like running a race or travelling), or something pressing (like having to finish grading or work). So it has been especially hard that this recent time has been punctuated for me by early morning clarity.

I hate early morning clarity. It literally makes me sick to my stomach; like the surge of hormones in a pregnant woman's body suddenly pooling nausea in her belly and throat, my morning clarity seizes my entire digestive tract. The snooze on the alarm isn't enough to cloud the thoughts streaming in like daylight; the thoughts are already burrowed in my mind, and only a new deep sleep would erase them. If only I had gotten drunk the night before, I think with grim sadness, I could have slept through it. But now I'm too restless for a return, so I fitfully toss around my bed, amongst pillows and cats, and I do something like moan. Moan is the right term, although no sound comes out--a silent moan into bright morning air.

I wake up having forgotten for a moment. Then I awaken fully to the clarity of the end, of all the steps to the end, of all the possible detours and alternate paths on the road lined out. So I wake up with the sense (false or not--truth is not the point at all, at all, and even that has its own lamentation) that I could have stopped it, could have prevented the sudden snapping that happened -- because I saw the snap and couldn't believe it. I had no senses to take it in.

Snap, like a twig, but a twig from some magical and necessary branch only spoken about in folk tales. It was a limp snapping, though very sudden. It didn't make any satisfying sound. Not like Beyle's branch full of salt crystals, the exemplum of love itself. So many things muffle the sound of the snap when it happens--sighs, gazes, the music innocently playing in the background, etc. If it were a movie, the image would be a bird flying suddenly from a limb with an insignifcant flutter of wings. And afterward, there is no afterward, there is only during. So, during your during, you don't know anything. You don't have the senses in place, beyond those needed for nausea.

And if all of this clarity came to me in a drunken, self-doubting haze, I could dismiss it. "But", I could say, "the end can't be attributed to just a few days" -- (but then, what's the definition of the end?). Oh yes, I know. But it comes to me in the biting clear of the morning. It comes over me with the insistent bleat of an internal alarm clock. I awake, and I feel it settle in around me. And there's no more rest. Morning, waking, ending, and ending, morning, waking.

it bears repeating

2007-03-06T17:21:00.000-06:00

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of people.
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I have found it worth living.

- Bertrand Russell

weakness

2007-02-27T00:19:00.000-06:00

I am weak-willed. Weak-fleshed. Welcome to the world, you might be retorting smugly under your breath. Ah yes, surely. But as Rousseau said, "it's the common lot of humanity; I felt it more than another." It's perhaps not that I am more weak-willed than any other, but I feel it now in such excess... A phrase of Sappho comes to me: that "loosener-of-limbs" she calls desire, but she could have just as easily meant despair (and perhaps she did -- indeed). My tendons have given in; they gape about my body in horrible slack-jawed puddles. That's just one example.

My heart, a black barreled stove, beckons, smoky and warm. The path to it must be littered with exquisite little objects marked "drink me" and "eat me", or "come closer" and "even closer than that!". It lures the kind of Alice whose games are still running about on other boards, whose words have not yet decided to obey deixis, and whose cards have not started to take her seriously. There is another sign, it seems, just on the netherside of the little stovepipe's lid, wherein translated from some uknown tongue into a barely decipherable script are the words "run the other way"--or "pull your tendons back up"--it's hard to make it out through the smoke.

My weakness is for literature, for reference. The girl plays at the labyrinth only as long as she still believes in minotaurs needing rescue, in crumbs to be trailed behind her, and in sorties of various kinds.

If only I had something to write. If only you would wear my tendons like Humpty-Dumpty's suspenders.

would you trust a barefooted meaning?

2007-02-23T16:08:00.000-06:00

It's this Fido business again.

“People are born and die and sometimes wear boots; meanings are not born and do not die and they never wear boots—or go barefoot either.”

--Gilbert Ryle from "The Theory of Meaning"

false coincidences, tumors and imaginary dogs

2007-02-22T20:00:00.000-06:00

I do not teach what I want to teach; not often. This is due to a certain positionality, not to my own desire. Perhaps it is my own desire that put me in this position, but that is no matter. I developed a class on memory after several months of deteriorating memory, with no intentional or causal desire therein. I was not obsessed with the memory lapses and losses; I affectionately called them collectively "the tumor", and I went about the world constructing the idea of a little marble-shaped pebble in my brain, pressing down on something and causing things to go awry. Of course, I knew better; this was the way to describe it that attributed absolutely no meaning to it--who can be expected to control a tumor that suddenly springs into the brain, like a lazy cheerleader springing to pert attention with a smiling bob of the head? Vapid tumor--what can be done? I treated the whole situation more like a sitcom than anything else, and the occasional stroke of anxiety was treated to the same derision, even offered up under the "absentminded professor" stereotype for general amusement. I stayed away from all analytic postures towards my memory question (while I poured over such postures in relation to the memory question). It was someone else who pointed out to me the odd coincidence of me researching and teaching a class on memory after months of having shilled my deadpan brain tumor through its paces. Why yes, how odd, now that you point it out. (Oh, come now, it was better than denying any coincidence at all, herr dr. at my head).

This reminds me of another time where the extremely obvious was pointed out to me in similar fashion. Upon turning in my first dissertation chapter to E. (first written, not first in order), on Stendhal's De l'amour, she said to me across the crackling long-distance line (imagine the slightly gruff yet velvety laugh of hers), something like this: "Do you realize that you've just written your first chapter, a whole chapter on doubt and love, while you were living through a break-up?". Why, no. I hadn't put my finger on that stunningly obvious fact. She had waited to tell me until she had the draft safely in hand, worried that such an observation--were I somehow unaware of it--would paralyze all writing; would turn it to fitful musing. She was right. It would maybe belong in Stendhal's work, but it would contribute nothing to it, or to its scholarship. Thinking back now, it mightn't have been half bad to have read myself into the text in such a precise way that I could no longer read it at all. (I say this as if I didn't do just that, dear readers, and you don't have to be some young Mme Roland to doubt that).

While writing--as I sat in Orleans at a makeshift desk bought for me by a lover who had already decided and announced, before I had arrived even, that he didn't want me to inhabit the desk after all--I hadn't noticed. ("The tumor" was clearly active before the memory problems appeared on the scene. The cheerleader, after all, has several outfits.) I had sat every day in an ugly apartment and written as I could, and spent every evening in the company of a man who had rescinded his offer of hebergement of the heart. It was pleasant enough, for agony. It was agonizing enough, for writing. I hadn't seemed to put the two together until E. spoke it out loud with such suave certainty and gentle concern for my unintentionally ironic position. This is probably a prime example of why I had felt so embarrassed to accept that I had changed my research focus from sexual difference to love--only a certain kind of dolt would write about love. One doltish enough to not recognize herself and yet bad enough to identify with the beloved of every text, and call that identification "reader" and pass it off onto others, trying to make them complicit. (One who still says "dear readers"...and means it.)

So, I am musing here and now insead of writing a paper about ... fill in the blank, sing-songy like if you so choose ...love. This time Derrida and love. Or rather, again Derrida and love. The last time this bit of textual explication was off the shelf and on the computer, it was witnessing the simultaneous ending of a dissertation and another relationship; this relentless question of address paired up with the me who curled up next to a lost artist-in-residence (our residence, a shared workspace where glances were soon not so much exchanged as hurled at each other in anger and despair). Fresh blood traces on the bathroom tiles are in some instances addressed, and you don't want to be reading Derrida when this brute fact makes its way into your awareness. For you'll find yourself a selfish cow if you do, as I did. That was the call to point out the obvious -- the ending of this chapter was finished in the presence of an already dead but unrecognizably so relationship (just as the stillborn Orleans experience).

So, here again, now, this business of love invades my desktop and a new topic has arisen, out of sheer necessity, lurching with only accidental meaning, to the fore: fidelity. And infidelity, of course. Just as all performatives are felicitous or infelicitious, or both; are all fidels also infidels? And the question turns to tin in my ear. I can't play. I know too much already, and the apres-coup has struck too soon, abominably soon. My Fido doesn't want to chase down the ball, doesn't want to fetch. There is no return address, and Fido isn't apologetic. So "the tumor" has become an imaginary dog? and a recalcitrant one at that? Why not? There is no point in bringing Fido into it if you can't say "come". And I can't say "come" at all anymore. And I want a tumor to blame; I want an imaginary dog to perform with my words; I want a sparkling cheerleader's barking chant to do something to block the flow; I want E.'s voice to wake me up once it's over.

house cleaning

2007-02-22T08:31:00.000-06:00

Two things in this category:

The first is that I made a batch of homemade dishwashing detergent that is eco-friendly, cheap, and effective. I want to recommend it. Mix in equal halves Borax and baking soda. I mixed it in one of those tupperware containers with a little spout at top for ease of use straight into the detergent dispenser. Plain vinegar in the rinse compartment will apparently help keep spots off the dishes and avoid any build-up, etc. So far I haven't used the vinegar but the dishes still come out looking as clean as they did when we were using those fancy little dual pellets.

The second housecleaning tip comes from Adrienne Rich, via Jules (thank you to her for drawing my attention here). It's from a poem called "Living in Sin":

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime.
A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl,
a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

I've always disliked that in our times we constantly refer to relationships as "hard work" -- I understand the comparison, but I think there's something stultifying for us to reduce every aspect of our lives to the rules and descriptions of labor. Alienated labor, no less. But this poem captures the bewildered awakening to the fact that love accumulates dust. That someone must take the decision to dust that furniture, or to ignore the dust and live joyously and messily through it, or to be confused and turn to some other form (poetry?), or to be disappointed and move on once the dust accumulates (surely there's something defective with the armoir of love if it can't keep dust away, the latter seem to say).

If it's labor to dust the furniture of love, though, it's not to be confused with a time-clock, a salary, a list of duties, the fulfillment felt from achieving goals in that realm. Is it too cute by half to say there's something like "a labor of love"? What I mean is that love is not 'hard work", relationships are not work in the typical sense of the word. No more than being alive is work. It is, of course, yes, yes--but not in the typical sense--and to reduce it to this precise manifestation is a limitation that leads to alienation. Rich's image of a young woman discovering with astonishment dust and messy traces where she expected a magical continuity of brightness is thus a fitting image. No one is shocked that dust appears in that other realm of labor ("what did you expect??!"), but in the realm of love, one has to do more than become accomodated to the fact of the dust. One has to come to love the squeaky stairs under the relentless milkman's step. Astonishment, but not alienation.

My Personal Disaster Management Act of 2007

2007-02-20T08:09:00.001-06:00

Let's play at ill-fitting analogies. If my break-up with J. is a hurricane, then I'm FEMA. My friends are the Red Cross (and other concerned citizens) who sweep in with assured competence and blankets, rescuing and comforting. But FEMA--what a mess!! Having seen this one coming on -- it's not like there weren't warning signs, and we all knew the levee was vulnerable in spots -- FEMA should have been more prepared. FEMA should have been able to do more pre-emptively, pro-actively. But this wasn't recognized as what it would become when it was just a little thing brewing on the horizon -- there are so many types of tempests, after all, even those in a teacup.

FEMA has had certain caveats written into its policies that have taken on nearly magical powers--for example, the belief that communication is the key to all problems, i.e., that communication leads to solving problems. The thing is, FEMA (I) took on the role of the little girl with her finger in the dyke (levee?), pointing out possible flaws in the system while believing that the recognition of such flaws makes them manageable. They are, after all, not structural, but accidental. And accidents shouldn't be binding for an entire system. They can be fixed, patched, renewed. But there's too much belief in management. Disasters can't be managed until they become disasters, and then, it's already clean up time. By then the buzz is about disaster preparedness. But you can't be prepared for a break-up. You can read the signs, put your wetted finger in the wind, use all manner of oracular predictions, but to those in love meteorology is an art--and a black art, since one believes that one can manipulate it, change the course of the winds rather than just chart them.

The disaster of the break-up is partially the sad fact of meeting a cliched and hypostasized version of one's self yet again. The break-up you is unique only in its instantiation this time, in relation to this person, this loss. And the break-up you relies on all the old tricks, whether they work or not. Sleep, a supposed remedy for the spasmodic pains, is, in fact, more of a pharmakon (poison/remedy). "Dormir, dormir, Dormir plutot que vivre!" wrote Baudelaire. Yes, but upon waking, the experience of is renewed, re-invigorated; the weeks or days or hours of suffering flood back in all at once. It takes a moment to settle into that limp skin, to re-align the bones to match limbs, and the eye holes to the eye sockets, like dressing a flayed doll. Waking is a diagnostic ritual: here is where it hurts in general; here is where it hurts today. But waking is not one moment that dissipates into a day; that feeling of waking, awakening, lasts through all states of consciousness (which is why sleep, in the end, is nonetheless a kind of relief), and you are always on the verge of drowning. There is no forgetting, there is only remembering differently. It's like a ... and thus begins a series of narrative gambits, a litany of metonymy. Such as: it's like a feeling of physical illness. It's like living for hours, days, weeks, in those moments just before you vomit--the involuntary cramping, spasms, shaking--and then the surge, during which your body shouts "no, no, no!". Then the few placid moments after, the release, through which your body still whimpers "no, no, no", and the beady sweat of peace is a sour promise of more to come.

My personal disaster management act of 2007, then, is about finding a different way to deal with the extreme anxiety and pain caused by facing a loss that I don't want to face, and that I believe is not inevitable (if I thought it were inevitable, I would have been ripping the fracture into a full-on break). It's fighting myself for control, fighting to understand (him, me, it), and then lying about graceful giving in to grief. It's not graceful, even when it's resigned. Analysis of the situation is, of course, a way to distance one's self from the emotion being felt; it's an underground refuge, like sleep, and just as futile. There is a need to describe the process, to narrate the inertia felt, and again, to control through manipulation, this time aesthetic (or at least, verbal, written). In honor of my disaster management act, I took a day off to dwell only on this -- to face this loss down like an old crusty sailor stands on the deck, clinging to the wheel, riding the storm through. (Also, in my version he pretends he's not visualizing the anchor, not dreaming of an end to the withstanding).

But the management act is never to go into effect for this particular instance; rather it is forward-looking. It tries to prevent the future disasters from being so disastrous. And it is perhaps the biggest folly to think that such guidelines for preparation can come in the middle of the weathering through the disaster that led to all the little bureaucrats calling for change, for better preparation. Bureaucrats of the soul, tired of toothaches. But as Eliot pointed out "a toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance." And I would add -- its duration.

So, about this loss, I say: "if this relationship is going to be, it isn't now." If I must make preparation, if I must consider management strategies or techniques, if I must stand here and look forward, let me do it in hope rather than in anxiety. If I must face the horizon of this (or any other) possible future passion, let me choose a new skin. This post can't be finished, because nothing can be finished in this state. It is contrary to all guidelines, but it is true nonetheless, that a new kind of hope--one conceived in the middle of the emergency--may signal the end of the disaster itself.

St. Etienne in technicolor--memoirish

2007-02-16T12:35:00.000-06:00

Once in Paris, a felicitous encounter that since serves as prototype for letting myself be unexpectedly taken by chance.

Several of us are walking home from a bar in the 5th, in the night that Paris allows. It's darker than one might imagine, the city of light, especially in the medieval offshoots of tourist districts. The darkness forms a cocoon of sound as our drunken footsteps echo through the muffled decorum. (There is a way in which drunken students too in love with literature inhabit the landscape of Paris--being there is a comfort and a shock to the system, through which one discovers a new way of being intoxicated.) On this occasion, the city itself seems buttressed by our gleeful gloom. There is no need to invent love in Paris, nor history, nor life. Glum little pupils of the night, we know this, and feel the hearty pulse of our uselessness to be both sobering and comical. The result is a dour gaity as we flit through the night scene like shadows on some black-and-white street-scene Paris photo that at least one of us had hanging on a dorm room wall somewhere.

But walking through the night, we also feel it walking through us, like some derisive yet nonchalant prostitute of the ages. "Like Baudelaire's cats," Renee (the future suicide) proclaims, and our gloom settles in with a decidely decadent twist, the insistent sound of our footsteps still sparking in all directions. Climbing a little hill, we cross towards the Pantheon, solemnly raucous, retracing steps laid down and effaced long ago in the grayblack stones, retraced so often by other students of other times, other cats of the night--by us, even--morning and night. Around the corner ahead should loom out of the darkness St-Etienne-du-mont. Just to the left it should appear, humming the stone-laden latin of the ages, monkish murmurings to join in with our procession. Instead, rounding the corner I see a trance of color throbbing through the night: garish, unexpectedly bright, there stands the church shrouded in technicolor brilliance like a sea of ravers with neon sticks twirling to no music.

A few seconds' time and the whole trick is understood, the device a projection of colors on the ornate but blank surface of the facade, all the little saints clothed as in disco attire and the windows like big pinwheels. An enterprising art project makes St-Etienne scream in color, every detail lit up, intensified, like ecstasy on the outside. A small group of artists near the projector are the only other witnesses to this collision. I am transfixed by this unexpected nightwash, transformed by this temporary illumination. It accompanies me home and preoccupies me such that I no longer see the stones under my feet as I walk on; I don't hear the echo of sparks tracing the glorious gloom of poetry and drunkenness, the various tombs of the night sought by those enthralled with their own youth.

simple greeting on the 14th

2007-02-14T08:51:00.000-06:00

On this day I say love whatever sustains you, even if it eats you up, like the addict loves her habit, his killer of pains, her intensifier of dasein. If sustenance is toxic, this doesn't mean you won't learn to love yourself better and more. Let this day call you to look at that and those you love; just look. Tomorrow can begin changing, if changing needs be. You don't have to seize, hold, drink down, succor, proclaim, no matter what the tv says.

Look the way an infant looks, with all its being both concentrated and dispersed, feeling a different axis of gravity (one whose rules we can't chart). There's a love in that both modest and extravagant. But for those of us with words more than anything, we can jangle them around like a sachet of teeth hidden under the pillow, hoping to attract good spirits; we can string them together, making jewels and knives, making occasions for coming and for leaving (love's first cousin, incestuous and innocently sinister.) My friends, you sustain me, and words, but most of all you.

"Words" -- by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.